Cloud Howe by Lewis Grassic Gibbon first edition 1933

GIBBON, Lewis Grassic. Cloud Howe. 

London: Jarrolds, 1933.
 
First edition. 8vo. Publisher’s black cloth, spine gilt; original pictorial dust wrapper (7/6 net), designed with bold village vignette. Pp. 286.
 
A sound very good copy in a poor dust wrapper. The wrapper shows several flaws: creasing and closed tears to upper and lower panels, loss to spine ends, chipping to corners, some marks and creasing across the front panel, and general handling wear; still presentable and unrestored. Book itself very good, with some moderate foxing to prelims, title page and edges, cloth dulled to the spine but boards firm.
 
The second novel in the celebrated Scots Quair trilogy—preceded by Sunset Song (1932) and followed by Grey Granite (1934)—Cloud Howe traces the struggles of Chris Guthrie in the fictional town of Segget, mapping rural life, politics, and Presbyterian religiosity with the same modernist energy and lyrical Scots-inflected prose that made Sunset Song a landmark in 20th-century Scottish literature. Gibbon (pseudonym of James Leslie Mitchell, 1901–1935) died prematurely at 33, leaving this trilogy as his defining achievement, often ranked among the greatest works of Scottish fiction.
 
Copies in dust wrapper are very scarce: most extant examples have survived only in poor state, as here. Nevertheless, highly desirable, given the trilogy’s stature in Scottish literary history and the increasing scarcity of this book in the first state jacket in commerce.